Every single collegiate golf tournament should be featured on the Unigolftour. If some crazy students get together and create a golf tournament – or, as it is so often the case, a whole experience that just happens to feature a round of golf or two somewhere in the middle – for other students it has its place on the Unigolftour. Or does it.

Thing is, that doesn’t really cut it. Because it’s not our goal to simply generate an online list of collegiate golf tournaments. A list that students can read, appreciate and then forget, since the only tourney they’re actually playing is the one close by and that’s it.

We want to move students. We want to give them a reason to carpool, leave for another place for a day or two, meet some collegiate golfers over there, play the best sport in the world, have a blast and then return home knowing they just had the best time of their lives – just to repeat the exact same procedure a few days later. Different tournament, different journey, same epic experience. And then again. And then again. And so forth.

Sure, with 19 tourneys in the 2015 season there’s no chance you play all 19 of them and still put in half a decent effort into your studies. Not gonna happen. But a proper Unigolftourist still picks more than just the local party. A proper Unigolftourist joins the circus as often as possible.

And herein lies the question. How often is possible? The one limiting resource is time. Lectures, exams and all those other collegiate obligations ruthlessly clutter up your calendar. There’s pretty much nothing we can do about that but to keep our fingers crossed that your schedule permits the odd participation.

The other limiting resource is money. We’re students, so the assumption has to be we don’t have any. Yeah, there’s probably a few spoiled kids among us, so what. We want our circus accessible for as many students as possible – as often as possible. And with fees for 18 hole tourneys moving towards 50 EUR we figured that’s not really the ideal development and we should do something about it.

Let’s be very clear about one thing. At no point do we imply that an 18 hole tourney for let’s say 45 EUR isn’t worth it. Quite the opposite. We know what an amazing job all the organising teams do round the countries, we love them for that and we figure the bang-to-buck-ratio is still mind-blowing.

However, the most essential element of the tourneys we feature is that they bring students together on the golf course. This feature doesn’t only come for free, it also facilitates securing adequate conditions at the golf course and make the event cheaper.

As much as we love a comprehensive dinner after the tourney, great tee off presents before or really any other part of the probably sensational overall experience, we need to put the price tag first and ensure that Unigolftour tourneys are available to a large group of students.

Note also that our overall university ranking has to be considered as well. There we just add upp all gross and Stableford points of all students registered for a particular university. That’s it. The idea behind it is to award the university that gets the most students playing, and not to award the university with the students who can afford maximum participation.

That’s why just before the 2015 Heidelberg Open we sat down with a few organisers and discussed the maximum fee for 2016 tourneys. The result of that well argued exchange was the consesus to put the limit to 35 EUR for an 18 hole tourney and 55 EUR for a 36 hole tourney. We figured that to be a fair and realisable compromise between getting something to work with for the organisers and keeping the fee as low as possible for the players.

The downside is of course that this compromise arrived a bit late for some of the tourneys that were already in a later stage of planning. And just as well, this compromise may very well collide on a general level with what tourneys set out to do. So for one or the other reason we’ve already suffered heartbreaking loss for the 2016 season: Amsterdam, Utrecht and now Nijmegen were or will not be able to meet our core criteria. We understand this as much as we regret it. We know that those tourneys rock incredibly hard and loud and we salute all the organisers behind them and celebrate their contribution to the flourishing of collegiate golf – or, enunciated more appropriately, to the f***ing party.

It’s our sincere hope that our temporary parting is as short as possible and we’re already looking forward to continue our sensational cooperation very soon. May that be due to the 35 EUR rising the odd euro for 2017, may that be due to tourneys cutting the fee down a notch, may that be due to a development that’s off our radar right now.

Until then let’s keep rocking, playing and moving! Let’s have the best Unigolftour season yet and many more to come.

Es gibt einen Kommentar:

Shame to see most of the Dutch tournament go.
But we’re very happy to still be part of the unigolf tour as the only Dutch tournament. So block may 14th in your agenda and visit the Dutch Student Masters 2016 in the city to be, Eindhoven.